| 摘要 | The Democrats aren’t going to come after you just for being religious. They won’t sic the feds on you unless you try to live your faith in public.
Beto O’Rourke, who first said he would deploy the IRS against any church that didn’t practice gay marriage, slightly modified his position in the following days.
“To be specific,” O’Rourke said, “the way that you practice your religion or your faith within that mosque or that temple or synagogue or church, that is your business, and not the government’s business.”
Well, that’s a relief.
“But,” O’Rourke said (there’s always a but when politicians such as O’Rourke talk about liberty), “when you are providing services in the public sphere, say, higher education, or healthcare, or adoption services, and you discriminate or deny equal treatment under the law based on someone’s skin color or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, then we have a problem.”
Yes, you can believe what you want, unless you emerge into the public square or attempt to serve others. Then you have to abandon your beliefs if they clash with contemporary morality.
O’Rourke is the only Democratic candidate to put it so bluntly, but it’s pretty obviously the position of the Democratic Party that the freedom of conscience doesn’t extend beyond the church door.
Democratic candidates who have denounced O’Rourke’s plan to tax churches that fall out of communion with liberal morality nonetheless have made it clear that the principle of nondiscrimination trumps any concern over the freedom of conscience, with the narrow exception of actual church services. Religious belief is fine, they argue, as long as you don’t actually live your life according to it.
Nancy Pelosi in recent years dodged questions about Democrats’ ambitions to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraception by saying, “I do my religion on Sundays.”
This is the same notion that lies behind President Barack Obama’s repeated comments about America’s “freedom of worship.” The words “freedom of worship,” of course, are not in the Constitution.
“Free exercise of religion” is the fundamental right protected by the First Amendment.
We are not merely guaranteed liberty to pray as we wish behind closed doors on our holy days. We are guaranteed that we may exercise our religion. That is, we may live out our faith.
A Christian cannot properly exercise Christianity only on Sunday. To exercise her religion, a Christian must love her neighbor, feed the hungry, and house the homeless. And she must also do so according to the moral teachings laid out in the Bible.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are not free to exercise their religion if the federal government makes them choose between ministering to the poor and following the teachings of the Catechism. Jewish people running an adoption agency are not free to exercise their religion if they are told they may not pair children born to Jewish mothers with Jewish adoptive parents.
And the administrators and teachers of a religious school are not free to exercise their religion, to follow their duty to form children into good God-fearing adults, if they are not free to require their teachers to follow a code of moral conduct.
Our liberal tastemakers today see culturally conservative views, particularly ones about sex and family formation, as inherently bigoted. If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman only, you are an anti-gay bigot in their eyes. The pro-life position on abortion and the Catholic teaching against contraception are shrugged off as evil plots to control women.
These liberal assumptions are ignorant, grounded in a lack of understanding about religious teachings and a lack of curiosity about them. Certain of their righteousness and certain of religious conservatives’ perfidy, these social liberals declare certain views out-of-bounds. They offer by way of dispensation their permission to run our worship services according to these beliefs.
We had just better not try to live according to them, or to bring them beyond the church door.
This isn’t toleration. It’s tyranny. |
